But then, as I was entering the final semester of my senior year, some Career Guidance dude told me that the State of California was running a program trying to rewire the electrical grid for the Sierra Nevadas – specifically the sparse communities in and around Sequoia National Park. They were looking for young electricians wanting to do a spell up in the mountains. When I said that that sounded rather cool – a chance to run away from everything and everyone for a while and do time in the Great Outdoors – Mr Career Counselor had one question for me:

‘How do you handle heights?’

I came to handle them pretty damn well. What I couldn’t handle (initially anyway) was my dad’s dismay that I was taking on such a blue-collar job after four years of college. When I explained that I was doing it for the adventure he got even more outraged.

‘Adventure is for the rich boys. For you, for me, life is about advancement and meeting our responsibilities.’

But I had no responsibilities back then. Nor was I looking to accumulate them. So I suffered Dad’s sulks. I took the job and discovered that I could scale a forty-foot electrical pole without much in the way of vertigo. Once up there I was able to wield all my equipment and maintain my equilibrium. Of course I was trained into this work by the foreman on the project: a guy who went by the name of Chet and came from Comanche stock and called me ‘college boy’ and laughed at me being ‘the Irish guy trying to get atop the totem pole’. He also let me know that I was the first ‘white kid’ he’d ever had on his crew, as the majority of ‘pole climbers’ (as he called us) were Native Americans – ‘’cause we all have a head for heights and danger’.

I lived in a bunkhouse with ‘the rest of the tribe’. I learned how to drink cheap vodka. I developed a liking for Viceroy cigarettes which turned into a habit (and now, thirty-three years on, remains a total dependence). I met a woman who worked in a local bar named Bernadette. She was almost thirty-five; a one-time croupier in Vegas until her guy Wayne (who dealt blackjack) was discovered trying to cheat the house – and got a bullet in the back of the head for his stupidity.

‘Rule number one of Vegas croupier life,’ Bernadette told me, ‘never cheat the house. Because you’re cheating the Mob – and the Mob only have one answer for people dumb or crazy enough to try to rip them off.’

Wayne found that out big time. Especially as he denied any wrongdoing. Bernadette herself got roughed up a bit – until she told the Mob that Wacky Wayne (her name for him) had a storage unit around two hundred miles from Vegas in the capital of Nevada, Carson City.